Adelaide physics link to Nobel Prize lecture

Animations created at the
University of Adelaide have been on display to the world, as featured by
a Nobel Prize winner for Physics in his recent Nobel Prize Lecture in Stockholm,
Sweden.

The animations, created by Associate Professor in Physics at
the University of Adelaide Dr Derek Leinweber, illustrate Quantum Chromodynamics
(QCD), the underlying theory of the so-called “strong interactions” in quantum
physics.

These are the interactions between quarks and gluons, which are the building blocks of matter and energy in the universe.

This year, there were three joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics:
David J. Gross (University of California), H. David Politzer (California
Institute of Technology) and Frank Wilczek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
They’ve been recognised for their discovery of a particular behaviour of
quarks, known as “asymptotic freedom”.

Dr Leinweber says he was excited to learn that his visualisations would be featured in the Nobel Prize Lecture.

"Of course I was delighted to be approached by Professor Wilczek to use our
animations in his Nobel Prize Lecture. Many of these animations were designed
precisely to bring the exciting world of QCD to the public in general," Dr
Leinweber says.

"We live in a unique time, when the predictions of quantum mechanics from
the early 1900s, which led to the discovery of the transistor, are now realised
as the seeds of modern technology where nearly every new electronic device
contains a computer chip," says the Director of CSSM and SAPAC at the University
of Adelaide, Professor Tony Williams.

“"Today we use the fruits of quantum
mechanics, namely supercomputers, to study the offspring of quantum mechanics;
that of Quantum Field Theory."

In his role as Deputy Director of Applications
and Visualisations at SAPAC, Dr Leinweber aims to bring the capabilities
of scientific data visualisation to South Australian researchers.

"The
SAPAC team is working hard to build a new Visualisation Suite to enable researchers
and industry to understand complex data sets, and explore new research directions,"
Dr Leinweber says.